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Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
38•thelok•2h ago•3 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
101•AlexeyBrin•6h ago•18 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
51•samasblack•3h ago•38 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
789•klaussilveira•20h ago•243 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
39•vinhnx•3h ago•5 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
63•onurkanbkrc•5h ago•5 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1040•xnx•1d ago•587 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
462•theblazehen•2d ago•165 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
509•nar001•4h ago•235 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
183•jesperordrup•10h ago•65 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
63•1vuio0pswjnm7•7h ago•59 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
186•alainrk•5h ago•280 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
49•mellosouls•3h ago•51 comments

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-fresh-look-at-ibm-3270-information-display-system
27•rbanffy•4d ago•5 comments

What Is Stoicism?

https://stoacentral.com/guides/what-is-stoicism
17•0xmattf•2h ago•7 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
19•marklit•5d ago•0 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
108•videotopia•4d ago•27 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
58•speckx•4d ago•62 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
268•isitcontent•20h ago•34 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
197•limoce•4d ago•107 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
281•dmpetrov•21h ago•150 comments

British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205nxy0p31o
169•bookofjoe•2h ago•152 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
152•matheusalmeida•2d ago•47 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
549•todsacerdoti•1d ago•266 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
422•ostacke•1d ago•110 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
39•matt_d•4d ago•14 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
365•vecti•23h ago•167 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
465•lstoll•1d ago•305 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
341•eljojo•23h ago•210 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
66•helloplanets•4d ago•70 comments
Open in hackernews

Doom song on the Oldest Digital Computer in America [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no0CkQk7id0
50•zdw•9mo ago

Comments

notachatbot123•8mo ago
*a song from Doom
ChrisMarshallNY•8mo ago
To be fair, it also does the graphics, but on a line printer, one frame per page.

Not exactly realtime.

amichal•8mo ago
Does it? I watched this video and the explanation of how they (mostly Bill in Vermont) did it had barely enough room for the song data. I think the line graphics might have been some good story telling
mystified5016•8mo ago
It was likely just a proof of concept run in the emulator. I'd guess it would be wildly impractical to get even that version of doom on real paper tape
TheOtherHobbes•8mo ago
The first version of Doom was around 2.4MB. ASR33 8-bit tape is 10 chars/inch.

So that's around 20 kilofeet of tape, or 440 miles.

jandrese•8mo ago
Sadly there is no chance that machine did anything close to rendering those printouts. The Bendix has about 8kb of memory and no random access storage so rendering even a single room using raycasting (instead of the BSPs that Doom uses) is a stretch, and adding an output routine is just going to blow your memory budget. You can't even use those 8kb of memory like an old microcomputer, it's arranged as 2,200 29 bit words. It might just be possible to have it render a single simple box room using raycasting into some kind of data structure in memory, and then load an output routine from paper tape to print it out, but even that will require the programmer to be very clever.
icameron•8mo ago
Ah yes, and I watched all 29 minutes to find out. It was still very interesting though and I’m still impressed. Not sure what the terminal program they showed at the beginning was, but the thing only “plays doom” (theme song)
mitkebes•8mo ago
Yeah I felt like that part was misleading, and undercut how cool of an accomplishment this actually was.

I would also be quicker to accept it if they stated really clearly at the beginning that it actually only plays a song, but it instead left me watching the whole video waiting for them to get to explaining how the got the actual game working.

alnwlsn•8mo ago
I think he should also go for the other meaning of "plays doom" and set it up as a sequencer which sends keyboard and mouse inputs, like a 900 pound TASbot.
datameta•8mo ago
The magnetic drum memory/storage is a fascinating precursor to RAM and hard drives, performing both functions simultaneously. The vacuum tubes only store the next set of processor instructions to be executed
jandrese•8mo ago
That experience when you start playing around with circuit design and are shocked at just how many transistors it takes to make a simple latch.

Now think about doing that with bulky and hot vacuum tubes and you quickly realize that you can't have any reasonable quantity of RAM without making the computer the size of a room. The vacuum tubes are just your registers and you need to be clever with the memory and storage. This is also why we don't use SRAM very much even today.

Can you imagine what a leap forward Core Memory was at the time? Not having to wait on a spinning drum to get around to reading the memory line you needed is like going from hard drives to SSDs.

Also, if any old timers remember the Story of Mel this is the class of computer Mel was working on.

datameta•8mo ago
I'll never forget the UNIVAC's mercury delay line memory in the Computer History museum - that just absolutely blew my mind and showed me how non-trivial of a problem memory was in early computers before even core came around
teddyh•8mo ago
Fake clickbait.